I’d used to do this with my siblings and cousins when I was a kid, and was delighted to be reminded of it again. ‘Whirlpool’ features the image of kids in an above-ground pool, running around its circular sides until it makes a whirlpool.

Then the fire is alight again with the final line, ‘I reach up to pull the elastic band and grips out of her hair’ (93). Our breaths fuelling it, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn’ (92). In the closeness, ‘that small heat build between us. As Claire takes up the role of breadwinning and parenting, their relationship fizzles, and the narrator can’t remember the last time his wife, who is a nurse, touched him ‘with hands that were anything except neutral and businesslike hands turning me over, carefully but somehow not gently’ (80), until the final scene, when she returns from a shift on Christmas Eve and manipulates his back. Here, the narrator and his wife Claire used to get on like the proverbial house on fire, until a back injury renders the former useless for months. The precarious connections between couples is also showcased in ‘Like a House on Fire’, which was probably my favourite. However, the richness of her emotion prompted by the baby compensates for the father’s inadequacies. A hundred dollars easy, it must have cost, when she hasn’t even got a change table’ (109). Her money, her baby allowance, already gone into their joint account. The father’s purchase of a miniature motocross jacket for the baby becomes an indicator of how ill-suited the couple are: ‘He stands there with that idiot chimp smile on his face, and for a few seconds she thinks she might punch him square across the mouth.

Poverty, both material and emotional, is a frequent theme in her works, and appears in Like a House on Fire in stories such as ‘Five-Dollar Family’ about a mother who insists on having a family photograph with her newborn and his ineffectual father at a shopping mall near the hospital. I haven’t yet read her poetry, but clearly she exercises her skill across genres, for she’s been awarded for this as well. I also thoroughly enjoyed her memoir, Sing and Don’t Cry, but was less enamoured of her novel The World Beneath, which felt baggy, the tension dispersed. I read it again in Dark Roots and was struck by her stark rendition of rural poverty. My first encounter with Kennedy was through her short story, ‘Cold Snap’, which won HQ Magazine ’s short story competition in 2001. After lying supine for five days and dragging my sorry carcass to the doctor (who said exactly what I knew he’d say: one needs to stop working 7 days a week), my brain finally switched on enough to read Cate Kennedy’s Like a House on Fire, plus a swag of other novels that I’ll review, hopefully before the month is out.

There’s nothing like a serious bout of flu to help you knock through your reading list.

Like a house on fire by cate kennedy